Sunday, April 4, 2010

Have a Happy Easter- IF YOU DARE!

I think the boys at DC were smoking a little too much Easter grass when they wrote this one.

I saw this cover over at Seduction of the Indifferent and the memories came flooding back. I bought this comic when I was eight. I tried to re-read this at HTML comics, but they don't actually have this particular issue.

The basic premise is simple: Some kids go to an Easter egg hunt which is hosted by a large, friendly-looking Easter Bunny and are, one by one, lured into a series of diabolical traps. At the end, all of the children have ended up in a big vat of chocolate in the basement of a scary old house. The Easter Bunny resurfaces, now looking like the one on the cover.

The bunny reveals to the children that he is bent on getting revenge for the hundreds of chocolate bunnies which are eaten every year. He plans to eat them (the children) and he "Always bite the heads off first!".

Like many stories in Unexpected, the twist ending doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Chocolate bunnies are, after all, just that. They are not rabbits dipped in chocolate. And if there really was an Easter Bunny, why would he suddenly crave revenge? It's analogous to Santa Claus vivisecting someone because they rip the paper on the packages.

Still, I must confess, this story scared the bejeezus out of 8-year-old me. I remember lying in bed, needing to pee, but terrified that the bathroom rug was really a trapdoor which would whisk me away to a vat of chocolate in the basement where that scary bunny (I can't even type "scary bunny" without cracking a smile) would eat me. We didn't even have a basement. Just a crawlspace.

Why The Silver Age?

I grew up in the late 70's and early 80's, right as superhero comics were going from a floundering social rant about human rights to a newly reinvented vision of your favorite heroes as masked psychopaths. Fortunately for me, my local library had a copy of "Batman from the 30's to the 70's" which I checked out and read regularly. I was hooked. I was filled with what Alan Moore would later call a "sense of wonder" at the elaborate interior of the Batcave. The supporting cast with room for a Batgirl, Batwoman, Bathound and Bat-Mite. Oh, sure, I joined the 1985 bandwagon of "Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen" style grittiness... but after a few years of that stuff, I began to miss, sincerely, characters like Streaky the Super-cat and Mr. Mxyzptlk. In a few more years, I began to really miss Aquaman's shirt (oh, and his hand). No, for me, superheroes will always exist in a shimmering land written before 1967.

Oh! And the images, indicia, titles, names. etc. of any comics or cartoon properties are copyright their respective owners.